


A line or two can give no great Offense

by tortoiseshells



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: (woefully lacking in actual pedagogy), Gen, Pre-Series, Silas Deane's first and only appearance in fic?, Slice of Life, Tallmadge's Brief Career as a Teacher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22285087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoiseshells/pseuds/tortoiseshells
Summary: Benjamin Tallmadge's correspondence with Nathan Hale through his first winter as a Connecticut schoolteacher, and what he has to write about.
Relationships: Nathan Hale (1755-1776) & Benjamin Tallmadge
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	A line or two can give no great Offense

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercuryGray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/gifts).



_Wethersfield, Connecticut Colony, Spring 1774_

For all that a gull could cross the Sound in a matter of hours, and so could wake to the noise of Father’s church-bells in Setauket but – if he were determined! – find an evening’s rest among the nets and smallboats of Wethersfield’s sleepy little river-cove, the daily rounds of life seemed a much different affair between the two places. Winter, particularly. Of course he’d written Nathan about it – holed up in his room with a guttering candle for company, Benjamin Tallmadge had scratched out his complaints: the loneliness of long nights (intermittently broken by invitations to the gaiety at Hospitality Hall, where Mrs. Webb pointedly did not notice the wearing on his cuffs), the draft in the Meetinghouse he’d begun to regard as his personal property, and – most disheartening of all – the distinctive breed of parsimony that came from a prosperous town. The ink hadn’t frozen in his students’ wells, but only just, it seemed. 

(This was everything – everything but the news from Boston. But then, all of New England was held still and waiting, a hunter holding his breath or the convict on the scaffold.)

He’d bundled his misery into letters to the lonely school-house at Moodus, and took himself down to the ice-choked river, of a morning, to reflect. The floes that jostled for position on their stately sweep south would pass Nathan by far before any missive of his arrived. His father had preached patience, but how hard it was to wait!

He’d missed home – missed Setauket, missed his friends, missed Nathan, missed Yale – through the winter, and yet there were consolations, which he endeavored to remember when teased for his letters’ unrelenting gloom. The conspicuous generosity of the Webbs, for one, and the warmth at Stillman’s Tavern when that failed. The people, too – and not just the Boardman girls, who Mrs. Webb seemed to be conspiring to place in his path. Outside of New Haven, Wethersfield must have had the largest number of Yale’s graduates – which was fortunate, for Silas Deane, the most prominent among the alumni, was ever too busy for questions regarding legal practice. A letter came in mid-February, blown along in the lull between blustering storms: greetings, the cold, consequences from the tea protest, his scant acquaintances in Moodus, the cold, news of their mutual friends, and, held for last – practically coyly! – an opening for a school master in New London! _The current Master, it is expected, will take his leave in March._ A quick reference to Providence, in whose hands all of this rested, _whatever my Fate, I remain your Friend and Humble Serv’t –_

News indeed! And better still, in the evenings, to speak of his friend’s good fortune than his politics at such an uncertain time, in a town not his own, where Beadle, one of the chief merchants, was not so many years removed from London.

 _No doubt_ , he’d eventually written back, _New London, from its whaling Business, will be yet a brighter place._ Deane’s wife ( _Mrs. Elizabeth Deane, not his Business and Ambitions, tho’ Deane is more frequently to be seen in the company of the latter than the former_ , he’d written months before, disgruntled) hailed from that port, and when not minding her husband’s affairs or her many step-children, she could be prevailed upon to talk of its news and its people. _Mrs. Deane assures me that New London has many comings and goings, and sufficient Beauties to decorate its good Fortune._ And so on in that vein. 

The response arrived with the turning of the seasons, and Tallmadge read with alacrity. _How Nice_ , Nathan wrote – an ink splatter where he’d laughed as he held his pen – _of you to curtail your usual round of Weathersfield Complaints to mock me_. His words had raced off: how grand the Union School would be, the challenge and prestige it would offer, pointed references to the future. Could there be a more ideal position for an ambitious young man? Even in such a precarious time? _I pray you will address all Correspondence past May to New London, and even there I shall be your Friend –_

He laid the letter on his table. It wasn’t so much further to New London, as far as letters went, as far as traveling went. He wouldn’t be in Wethersfield forever.

**Author's Note:**

> for MercuryGray, who prompted on tumblr: "How nice of you to take time out of your grievance to mock me" and _Turn_? Characters of your choice!"
> 
> Benjamin Tallmadge is annoyingly mum about his days in Wethersfield in his autobiography, so in great part I based this off of what I could glean from Phelps's Hale bio and McDermott's history of Wethersfield to 1790, and the letters from Tallmadge to Hale that Yale has helpfully digitized. All words and errors my own.
> 
> All named characters (except the Boardman girls - I only borrowed a common last name) are real, although I won't say my interpretation is necessarily correct. Deane perhaps deserves an apology, since he hadn't done anything too dodgy yet in 1774. Still, a man on the up and up probably had little time for an Eli just out of school, even if he intended to be lawyer.
> 
> Incidentally, Ben's wrong about Beadle - William Beadle was a staunch supporter of the Revolution through the war, though it ruined him. Alas, these days, Beadle's more famous for murdering his wife and four children.
> 
> Title derived from a poem tentatively attributed to Hale, the truth of which I cannot comment on.


End file.
